Our last theoretical class was about New Media, and it stuck with me throughout this whole pandemic outbreak. In having to find new ways to do things we usually took for granted, such as attending classes, going to work, working out and interacting with your families and friends, people have truly embraced the visual field, and what we can see now will, hopefully, provide fruitful terrain for visual anthropologists for years to come.
Stewart (2013) talks about the project MyStreet as a public, collaborative anthropology. He also highlights why films are so relevant for cultural recognition. According to him, “it has an extraordinary capacity to plunge its viewers into worlds far away from their own, as if a participant” (p. 318). One quick search on YouTube with the word quarantine will bring us to our own collaborative anthropological project. From diaries about how it is to quarantine in Mexico, how to deal with mental health issues, instructional videos on how to stay fit and what to eat, to celebrities sharing and presenting their shows from their homes. YouTube, and these videos are, at this moment, perhaps our biggest collaborative project. This pandemic might be the most well-documented in history. And the fact that we are all stuck at home, instead of making the job of the visual anthropologist harder, in fact, provides us with original content we could have never imagined before.
However, what exactly is this New Media and why is it so special? This is what Manovich (2001) discusses in his text. The most interesting characteristic that he points out, and that we can clearly see during these trying times of the pandemic is precisely the interactivity. So far, the examples I mentioned focused mostly on production of audiovisual material for distribution on YouTube, however, this is far from being the only way in which New Media is visible in the pandemic. Precisely because people are not allowed to interact with others in real life, online interaction has become a crucial way of communication and getting things done. Manovich describes the user as the co-author of the work and, to me, this is visible in, for example, Instagram lives. Several gyms and fitness studios have been broadcasting their lessons live for their customers, and interaction is a huge part of it.
One can only speculate what kinds of projects will come out of this quarantine, but one thing is for certain, New Media is what is keeping us together and bringing us closer, and I cannot wait for this to be over to see what beautiful material will be produced by us visual anthropologists.
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